Via MR.
I’m amazed and delighted by how little I know about almost all of them, and how helpful ChatGPT is with each tweet. And “new ancient language” is my favorite phrase of the lot!
Tag: MR
Links about these changing times
- Agnes Callard on wanting to feel pain:
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“We don’t consciously choose to feel pangs of guilt or waves of regret, in the way that we consciously choose what novel to read. Still, we can assimilate the two sorts of cases if we introduce a hypothetical: Imagine you are offered a pill that would make you immune to regretful or guilty thoughts. Would you choose take it? If your worry is that those thoughts are important for steering you away from future wrongdoing, let me assure you I’ve built that functionality into the pill: You won’t behave any worse for having taken it. You’ll just stop having negative feelings.”
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.. - Via MR, social distancing and examinations in South Korea. (I’m not a fan)
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.. - Scott Adams has been calling it correctly for a while. Read more Dilbert!
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.. - Again via MR, a lovely list.
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.. - What will change, culturally speaking? Telecommuting will be the default, and in the years to come, maybe you’ll have to ask the manager for permission to go to office.
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“But the pandemic is forcing these investments in industries where telework is possible, with more people learning how to use remote technology. As a result, we may see a more permanent shift toward telecommuting. As the economist Susan Athey recently told the Washington Post, “People will change their habits, and some of these habits will stick. There’s a lot of things where people are just slowly shifting, and this will accelerate that.””
Five articles from economists about tackling the crisis
- Arnold Kling advises us to not worry about “going back to normal”. It’s about winning the war, no matter what it takes. There will be a new normal at the end of it, and no one today knows what that normal will be like. Focus on winning!
“We are acting as if our biggest worry is how to get back to our “normal,” pre-war economy. Our biggest challenge instead is to win the war, after which we will transition to an economy that looks considerably different, just as the post-WWII economy was quite different from the pre-war economy.”
- I found this fascinating: on how the RBI is working to keep our financial system alive.
As the country goes on a self-imposed lockdown to fight the coronavirus contagion, a crack team of 150 people, in hazmat suits, is keeping India’s financial system up and running since March 19 from an unknown location in a completely quarantined environment. These 150 people, including 37 officials from critical departments of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), such as debt management, reserve management and monetary operations, and third-party service providers, are now in charge of the business continuity plan of the central bank, designed in a way that could help create a benchmark for such exigencies in the future as well.
- Greg Mankiw comes up with a form of social insurance. Here’s a challenge for you – how would you game this system?
Let’s send every person a check for X dollars every month for the next N months. In addition, levy a surtax in 2020–due in April 2021 or perhaps spread over several years–equal to N*X*(Y2020/Y2019), where Y2020 is a person’s earnings in 2020 and Y2019 is a person’s earnings in 2019. The surtax would be capped at N*X.
- Via MR, how about pausing time?
Sometimes, the best solutions to big problems are very simple. Regarding the current outbreak of COVID-19, I propose a solution that—on the surface—might seem preposterous, but if one manages to stay with it and really think through the potential benefits, then it emerges as a much more credible course of action.I propose temporarily stopping time. This means that today’s date, Tuesday, March 17th, 2020, will remain the current date until further notice. This also means that everything that happens in time (e.g. mortgage due dates, payrolls, travel bookings, stock market trading, contractor gigs, concerts, sporting events) will be paused. It also means that all of these events remain on the books, and will continue as planned once time is resumed.
- And on the same point, Tim Taylor:
“Here, I want to focus a bit on a theme that comes up in a number of the essays: the idea that sensible economic policy can put the economy in the freezer for a few months, and the pull the economy out of the freezer, thaw it out, and restart it. I find myself in the awkward position here of largely being in agreement with this policy as a short-run approach, and at the same time also feeling that the ultimate consequences of the policy are going to be more difficult than a number of authors are envisaging. ”
(An aside: WordPress formatting has already cut years from my life, and will continue to do so. That last bit is, to be clear, an excerpt. That is clear to me, to you – but not to WordPress)
EconForEverybody 